Before the categories of “book” and “Bible” dominated the literary imagination, Mroczek asks, “What did this literary world seem like to Second Temple writers?” (4). How did the creators and users of literary artifacts organize and conceptualize writing? We note that this literary world of Second Temple Judaism is explicitly textual; Mroczek avoids the temptation to see orality as the only alternative to our familiar models of textuality: she explores literary modes that are “deeply, self-consciously textual, but shaped differently from our own” (5). Read the rest of this entry »

What modes of reading does the fourfold gospel imply? To answer this question, Francis Watson (Durham University) presents “a theological reading of the New Testament portraits of Jesus.” As the indefinite article makes clear, Watson does not assert a prescriptive reading; rather, the specific readings demonstrate the fruitfulness of reading the fourfold gospel as a complex literary and canonical unity. He invites the reader to experience a different mode of reading, guided by a number of “pre-critical” exegetical insights. Both Watson’s reading and his argument about reading succeed, although this reviewer found the latter more abundantly fruitful than the former. Read the rest of this entry »

2018.06.08 | Andrew Ter Ern Loke. The Origin of Divine Christology. Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 169. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 249 pp. Reviewed by Kai Akagi, Japan Bible Academy. Andrew Loke’s The Origin of Divine Christology continues the stream of works on early high Christology of the neue religionsgeschichtliche Schule by arguing that […]

2018.05.07 | Adams, Sean A. and Seth M. Ehorn, eds. Composite Citations in Antiquity: Jewish Graeco-Roman, and Early Christian Uses. Vol 1. London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Reviewed by R. Jarrett Van Tine, University of St. Andrews. This work is the first of a two-volume set addressing the curious literary technique of composite citation (CC). […]

2018.02.04 | Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, Micah: A Commentary. OTL. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2015. Reviewed by Mark Glanville. Daniel L. Smith-Christopher has produced a new commentary on Micah in the Old Testament Library series. This commentary follows an earlier commentary on Micah in this respected series by James Luther Mays, published in 1976.1 The body of […]

2018.01.02 | Jörg Frey and John R. Levison, eds. The Holy Spirit, Inspiration, and the Cultures of Antiquity: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Ekstasis 5. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017. Reviewed by Jesse D. Stone, University of St Andrews. This volume gathers together essays produced as part of an interdisciplinary project on the historical roots of early Christian pneumatology […]